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Images from Dr. Faust's combat zone
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T.V. Santhosh's first, and on-going, solo exhibition at Mumbai's Jehangir Art Gallery, makes an impact on the viewer because of the artist's grasp of global crises, says RANJIT HOSKOTE. A review of `One Hand Clapping/Siren'.
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"Handful of Ashes", T.V. Santhosh, oil on canvas, 2003.
T.V. SANTHOSH, whose paintings have appeared in various group shows during the last few years, already occupies a prominent position among the emerging generation of Indian artists. Viewers familiar with his work may be surprised, then, to learn that "One Hand Clapping/Siren", which opened at Mumbai's Jehangir Art Gallery in July and continues this month at the Guild Art Gallery, is this 1968-born painter's first solo exhibition. Santhosh's thematic and formal concerns are demonstrated to advantage in this suite of 14 recent oils. We are struck by this artist's grasp of the crises that beset our globalised present. His narratives, in which he translates current events, are too allegorical to be history, yet too mutable to be myth. In common with many of his contemporaries, Santhosh works with the pictorial readymades of expressive culture, drawing his source materials from magazines and television, but also from art history and world cinema. His pattern of selection is determined, however, by the key themes of war and catastrophe: his art is attentive to the specific idioms of contemporary global conflict, to the diabolical pact between knowledge and terror, the skewed antagonism between puissant globality and weakened locality. We enter his narratives midway into the action: formally, these paintings focus on a moment of crisis or a sudden manifestation, a figurative focal image that is often bordered by a margin of blur, an abstract passage suggestive of cosmic radiation, microbiological skeins, or a close-up view of fabric or flesh.
The dualism proposed here, strongly implying a cycle of expression and extinction, reverberates at various levels in the exhibition. Indeed, the title, "One Hand Clapping/Siren", encodes the parentheses that bracket human existence, for Santhosh: the enlightenment promised by the Zen koan, and the permanent emergency that informs our militarised world. Several of these near-monochromatic, quasi-photographic paintings allude to Santhosh's conviction that contemporary life is a precarious balancing act performed between two extreme possibilities: a personal transcendence through creative articulation, and a collective annihilation through nuclear war. In the left-hand panel of "Handful of Ashes", Santhosh's friend, the artist K.P. Reji, is shown watering a patch of soil, while a mushroom cloud blooms behind him; he seems to be cooling the ashes at the scene of a nuclear devastation. The right-hand panel, which shows a scene of aftermath by the greenish luminescence of night vision, both memorialises and ironises the impossible, even quixotic heroism of Reji/Santhosh's gesture, its insistence on the virtues of organic growth against cataclysmic warfare, its assertion of vitality against mortality.
Significantly, the artist is preoccupied with the distortion of science and technology into vehicles of terror, contributions to the paramount instability of our Faustian epoch. The laboratory, as much as the battlefield, is where the action of his paintings is set; the two venues are often conflated. Several of the present works are framed in a lab reminiscent of that inhabited by the evil genius of the classic science-fiction movies, replete with glass tubing and alembics, infernal electrical machines, and experimental animals. In "Your Land, My Laboratory", a painting that references the younger Holbein's 1533 masterpiece, "The Ambassadors" (National Gallery, London), Santhosh displaces the sumptuously robed diplomats with two men in chemical-warfare suits. Forbidding spectres in gas masks, they preside over a landscape that is both combat zone and testing ground.
Santhosh references the Holbein masterpiece again, in "Two Wise Men and Their Sheep". His gaze fastens upon the detail of the ambassadors' feet; adapting the allegorical spirit of the original, he inserts into this frame a grave-digger's shovel and Dolly, the cloned sheep. The play of image and title assures us, bleakly, that the magi and the scholar-diplomats have been replaced by genetic engineers and military strategists.
As global elegies, annotations to an era of epic-scale turbulence, cryptic speculations on a clouded future, these paintings are incomparably more resonant than reportage; while they share in its subject matter, their treatment elevates them beyond the limitations of the front page. Reportage, even of upheaval, moors us in a constant present: the sheer everydayness of its form normalises the elusive or epochal nature of its content. By contrast, Santhosh distances us from everydayness: his stylistic treatment plays up instabilities in the present, amplifies the portentous and dramatic charge of the events he describes and dreams of, thus invoking the unanticipated at the heart of the apparent.
This distinctive stylistic treatment, which makes Santhosh's paintings recognisable without being predictable, subsumes three cardinal elements: first, a mode of representation that has erroneously been termed photo-realism; second, a strict tuning of chromatic scale; and third, an incremental transfiguration of the material, by degree and detail, that is all the more shocking for its unobtrusiveness.
Many artists of the generation that emerged during the late 1990s have taken a deceptive photo-realism for their point of departure; but Santhosh sets himself the rules for a new game. He zeroes in on the few telling details in the wraparound reality that is the global circulation of media images. In fact, his handling is neither photo-realistic nor quasi-photographic. Rather, his velvety hyperrealism shrewdly alters the proportions and dimensions of the given, emphasises the sensuousness of folds and highlights, invests the quotidian with mystery. Santhosh's visuality, ostensibly based on the photographic, is in fact far more akin to the cinematic.
The adherence to a near-monochromatic, often bichromatic tonal scale, is one of the firmest rules of Santhosh's pictorial game. It conveys the dramatic expressive strength of black-and-white cinema; his paintings resemble stills extracted from old films, tinted and enhanced with additional material.
Their hallucinatory intensity is best demonstrated in "Metabolism Test", a diptych based on the scene from Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" (1957) in which the knight plays chess with Death. In Santhosh's version, Death, in white mask-face and black hood, is ever more sinister for appearing in a laboratory setting.
"In God's Name", oil on canvas, 2003 ... homage to Giotto.
Santhosh insistently ruptures the surfaces of reportage with oneiric leitmotifs. Against a mountainous backdrop, the protagonists of "In God's Name" — besieged guerillas or condemned prisoners? — are beatified with haloes around their heads, in homage to Giotto. For his minatory purposes, here and in other paintings, he appropriates the figural slash that floats in the foreground of Holbein's "The Ambassadors" — and which reveals itself sharply, when you stand back, at an oblique angle to the right of the picture plane, as a skull. This anamorphic projection, a caveat to revelry and opulence, recurs in conjunction with a scatter of roses in "Siren".
Death and redemption are linked, in Santhosh's universe, by means of the transfigurations that he enacts, his references and devices, which push his concretely visualised figures up against the abstractionist margin of blur. Beneath the cool finesse of the surfaces, the oblique wit and low-key rhetoric, lies an impassioned sensibility. It is manifested in his troubled, interrogative attitude towards war, his awareness that science unbridled by compassion is folly, and the relentless desire for knowledge a pathology. It is embodied, most critically, in the imbalance between the focal image and the margin of blur — the imbalance that dynamises the cinema-still-like painting, igniting the viewerly imagination, and producing that "movement of consciousness, which is time", in J. Krishnamurti's words. With that movement, the painting becomes an epicentre of disturbance, which demands to be accounted for; we cannot glaze past it, as we do with the news, nor can we take comfort in it, as we do with myths domesticated by conventional imagery.
These observations prompt me to make an apparently startling proposal. I suggest that Santhosh's aesthetic is a reclamation of the Mannerist vision, in the highest sense. "Mannerism", now demoted to lower-case, pejorative usage, is a powerful category, one that should correctly recall, not the frenzied contortions of Pontormo, but rather, the theatre of metamorphosis, exaltation and enigma directed by El Greco. Developed in response to the seismic political and religious unrest of 16th-Century Europe, this high Mannerism is an apt template for Santhosh's transfigurative strategies. A high Mannerist turn can be read at every level in Santhosh's art: in the drama of lighting and nimble schematics of his mise-en-scene; the deft, not instantly discernible exaggeration of feature and situation that defines his cinematic hyperrealism; in the mood of his works, partaking at once of melancholia and airiness; and in his operation of a panoramic and inclusive space, where both the epic sweep and the intimate gesture maintain their significance, without cancelling each other out.
At the same time, the artist updates the Mannerist legacy, editing out its flamboyance and melodrama, holding its hallucinatory intensity in check with deadpan chromatics and the framing devices of rubric and double panel.
Santhosh belongs to a generation that must ask urgent questions of history, if it is to survive a period intent on crushing the dissident spirit of inquiry and resistance. His project is a striking materialisation of that re-invigorated history painting that has emerged as one of the dominant genres in recent Indian art.
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